Do not despair

Sixty-three years as an independent country, how are we feeling?

The Independence Day parade has been cancelled, ostensibly for security reasons. We are under a State of Emergency, the second for the year. Both were declared because crime has reached such a level of seriousness that it threatens the security of the State itself.

Crime in our country is so bad that Trinidad and Tobago is top of mind for the Vice President of the United States as a place where Americans should not visit.

In the face of rising crime, including home invasions, kidnappings and assassinations, the government has brought forward draft ‘stand-your-ground’ legislation, modelled explicitly on American precedents.

In a society born out of slavery and indentureship, that has always been scarred by anger and violence, this draft legislation would seem to mean that every citizen would have the right to possess a gun and legally entitled to take the life of another citizen in defence of their property.

How this would help to promote the values of a just and harmonious society is unclear. What is clear is that it is morally unacceptable to take the life of someone who is stealing your mangoes or avocadoes on your property.

Our reality, 63 years after raising the flag and singing an anthem, is that justice and harmony seem to be elusive. The police, judges, and prisons officers are unable to satisfy the population, especially the ordinary man in the street who might be languishing on remand for years, that in any given circumstance, justice will be done.

This is particularly so with white-collar crime where we seem incapable of holding people to account. The police, whether out of frustration, fear or malice, deliver ‘rough justice’ evidenced by the soaring number of extrajudicial killings. Some police and prisons officers are known to be complicit with members of the criminal underworld.

Society today is perhaps even more rambunctious and fractious than it ever was. There is little that is held sacred. There are no spaces and situations and offices which are instinctively respected by all and afforded dignity and due respect. Vidia Naipaul had said of us: “Power was recognised, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes” (The Middle Passage).

Our elites, the so-called ‘one per-cent’, are ‘fake’. Arthur Lewis had written of us many years ago: “No social rank, not even that of the Governor, is privileged against sharp comment”. We can replace ‘Governor’ with ‘President’.

Social media has brought to the surface and wide circulation the contempt, the anger and the resentment which lies just below the superficial conviviality of our daily interactions. Our woundedness as a society is being laid bare.

‘God is a Trini’

Yet miraculously, we have endured. We can ask ‘How?’ or ‘Why?’.

The answer is that indeed ‘God is a Trini.’ This phrase does not mean what we usually take it to mean—that when things get bad, God will intervene and do something to set things right.

What it really means is that many Trinbagonians, irrespective of religion or ethnicity or geography, are infused with an unwavering love for their fellow citizens that comes from God.

They work every day to show mercy, bind the wounds of those who are hurting, and build bridges between and among everyone. They are doctors, lawyers and judges, engineers, CEPEP and port workers, housewives, priests, imams, and pundits, even politicians.

That work goes unheralded and unsung. It does not make the papers. It is not trumpeted on social media because it is animated by love and humility, not by pride or the prospect of reward or publicity. It is the glue that holds and has held our society together in the face of our trials and tribulations.

Sixty-three years on, how are you feeling? If we focus only on the crime and corruption, we have a right to feel despondent and despairing. However, if we can discern and focus on the work of the angels among us, we can be hopeful, even joyous.